Chris from the excellent “Board Game Hot Takes” podcast recently asked me about Food Chain Magnate (FCM) and the sometimes-expressed feeling that it is a “mean” game. I understand where that is coming from, because it is a game that punishes the slightest disparity in strength between two would-be magnates of the food-chain variety, meaning that even a slight nudge on the scale can upset one player’s plans, sending all the sales to another player, possibly requiring the person on the losing end to fire workers or suffer some other serious long-term setback. And the difference between the two competitors can be tiny—having one fewer waitress than your competitor, or advertising one pizza to the houses someone planned to sell burgers to, making those burgers go cold, unpurchased.
Despite that difficulty, my response to Chris was yes, the game is brutally punishing at times, but nothing anyone does to you is out of the blue. It is all telegraphed and when people are good at the game (and I do not include myself among that tier, at least not yet), every move offers a countermeasure of some sort, at least until you make a mistake that throws you hopelessly behind. In other words, the game is only mean for those who fail to foresee trouble.
Here is an example from a game I am playing with a college buddy on onlineboardgamers.com, which is a nice place to play Food Chain Magnate. On turn 5, during my turn, I placed an airplane to do some aerial marketing.
Now just to explain a few game things so this all makes sense, the goal of FCM is to make the most money over two bank cycles. The bank starts with $50 per player, and when that money runs out (in game terms, when the bank “breaks”), the first cycle is done. You refill the bank based on a secret vote the players take at the start of the game, and then when that second slug of money is used up (the bank “breaks” for a second time), the game ends. In the picture above, from a two-player game, we are in Turn 5, and the Bank has not yet broken at all—there is still $85 left in the first of the two bank cycles.
In the base version of FCM, you make money by selling burgers, pizza, and 3 different kinds of drinks (expansions add all sort of other food wrinkles), and also by confiscating tips from your waitresses (yes, really). Other than the waitress grift, you cannot make money unless a house has demand for the products you have available to sell. So, a big part of the game is advertising to houses to encourage them to demand the products you can sell (even better if it’s ONLY you who sells them), and ideally not to buy products only your competitors sell.
In the turn I have screen-captured here, I placed an airplane to do marketing. Marketing comes in 4 strengths: billboards, direct mail, airplanes, and finally radio. An airplane will fly in a row or column across the board, placing demand on any house it flies over. In the situation we see here, the swath of pizza demand this marketing campaign will create is like this:
Any house that is even a little bit within the column created by the airplane will start to crave pizza, as of next turn. As a preview, the board will look like this as a result (though recognize there is also some smaller-scale billboard advertising going on for burgers and lemonade, so focus on the pizza for now):
And yes, the map that was set up randomly at the start of this game is perfect for airplane marketing because all the starting houses fit into a column that a single well-placed airplane can reach.
Those of you unfamiliar with the game now know enough about how it works to understand the story I’m going to tell about how Food Chain Magnate is brutal but not mean, in that everything is foreseeable if only you have the perspicacity to perceive it.
Unlike a lot of Euros, where you can generally ignore the nuance of what other people are doing, in Food Chain Magnate you really need to assess your opponents’ moves because it is a clue as to what the market will look like at the moment you hope to sell your products and make money/win the game. Every move I make should cause my opponent to ask Why? Consider this move I just made.
When you play an airplane marketing campaign, it can be set to last between 1 and 4 rounds. When I placed my airplane, I picked just 1 round. The other player saw that, even before the pizzas (indicating demand) started appearing in the people’s houses later in the round. In this case, the Why is: Why would I have chosen only 1 round? Well, there are a few reasons but one thing that my opponent should have known for sure is that I planned to do something different with the airplane marketing worker next turn. Maybe switch to a different product, maybe switch to a different location (although on this map, that is unlikely, since the one airplane covers every house in the game), or maybe to leave the marketing worker “on the beach” and not doing anything so I can train it up to the highest level of marketing, where it can run radio campaigns. Spoiler, dear reader, but the last of those is what I planned to do. Let’s see how it happened.
On the very next turn, my marketing worker was available to be put back to work, but I did not select him. In the game’s lingo, I left him “on the beach.” But I did put two trainers to work. A savvy Food Chain Magnate gamer would suspect that one of those trainers was going to train up my marketer so that he could begin using radio campaigns next turn. As soon as our org chart gets revealed (this is the only part of the game that is done in secret and then revealed simultaneously), my opponent saw that I did not put my marketer to work, and so the best guess here is that I am going to improve my marketer’s skillset, and thus my opponent should prepare for a radio campaign soon.
Lo and behold, on my turn I did, in fact, train the marketing worker up one notch:
I also trained a second Pizza Cook. Since I already had one working, but don’t have any source of lemonade, and only access to a single burger per turn (if you don’t know Food Chain Magnate, that may not be immediately obvious, but don’t sweat the details—trust me*), the fact that I doubled down in pizza, even when I just turned off my pizza marketing campaign earlier than I had to ought to suggest to an experienced FCMer that maybe Pizza Marketing is coming back, and this time it’ll be on the radio.
*What you don’t trust me? Ok. Look at who I sent to work. There is no Errand Boy, Cart or Truck Operator and no Zeppelin Pilot. Those are the four ways to get drinks. And there is neither a Burger Cook nor a Burger Chef, so no source of multiple burgers, but there is a Kitchen Trainee who can produce either one burger or one pizza, at my choice later in the round. So, my opponent knows I can’t make any drinks and my burger production, for the moment, maxes out at 1.
Radios are even more powerful than airplanes when it comes to generating demand. A radio campaign affects every house on a 2-player board. There are more rules than that for 3p and larger, but for 2p it’s very simple. Also, in terms of priority, radios always go ahead of other forms of marketing, which means that if a house is going to fill up before the marketing finishes (some houses cannot demand more than 3 items, the others are capped at 5), it will get whatever is on the radio before the other marketing campaigns try to add their products.
One more thing you should know about Food Chain Magnate is to understand the magnitude of the looming pizza bomb. Food Chain Magnate is filled with mini racing games. The game hands out “milestones” for the first (with ties allowed) to do almost everything. And the milestones provide truly game-altering bonuses. Unless all players mimic each other perfectly, as the game progresses, some people will get some of these bonuses and others will get different ones and soon an almost perfectly symmetrical game becomes wildly asymmetrical.
As a relevant example, the first person to run a radio marketing campaign gets a huge bonus: every marketing round run by the radio will place double the demand in each house it reaches. And so as my opponent, you would know (a) Andy is about to drop a pizza bomb, (b) it will cover every house on the board, (c) it will generate 2 pizzas worth of demand for each house, (d) Andy is building an empire of Pizza producers to get ready for this looming Pizzapalooza.
And that is exactly what happened. Soon, I trained one of my Pizza Cooks into the more powerful version, a Pizza Chef, meaning my Pizza production potential increased by 5 pizzas per round.
In the same turn, I placed my radio campaign for, yep you guessed it, pizza. This time I did it for 5 turns, not just one, which is the maximum length for radio campaigns.
My reward, as predicted, was the bonus that let me advertise 2 pizzas per house rather than just 1.
So, when the Pizza Bomb hit, I dropped 10 pizzas’ worth of demand onto the 5 houses on the board, and the board looked like this:
The very next turn, I put to work all of my pizza production potential into play (along with an Errand Boy who can get me the lemonade I need and a Kitchen Trainee who could make a burger or could, instead, make one more pizza), meaning I can produce either 11 or 12 pizzas, 0 or 1 burger, and 1 lemonade.
I went with 11 pizzas, 1 burger, and 1 lemonade:
Then, when the turn rolled around for me to sell, I made LOTS and LOTS of money. And my opponent sold far less than I did because his total pizza capacity at this point was just 1 (but importantly, he also had 1 pizza in his freezer, meaning he ended up with 2 pizzas for sale when it came time to sell our food). His restaurant was better situated to meet the needs of a lot of the houses on the board, but because he only had 2 pizzas, he only sold to one house, and I sold to the other 4.
Side note – if you don’t know Food Chain Magnate, you might not know one of the key rules, which is that if you cannot meet the demand of a given house for ALL the products it wants, you can’t sell to that house. So House 7, sitting there with demand for 2 Pizzas and a Lemonde, or House 12, with 2 Pizzas of demand, are both closer to the blue restaurant (my opponent) than the red one (me) but I got House 12’s sales because my opponent had only two pizzas (and a lemonade for House 7) to sell. He’s lucky he had the extra pizza in the fridge, which allowed him to sell to House 7, but then I sold 8 pizzas to the other 4 places, including House 12 which would have been his if he’d only had the supply.
So was I mean to tell my opponent two or three turns in advance that I was not planning to have a long-term commitment to airplane-based pizza marketing, to then make a move that clearly indicated I would switch to radio-based marketing which would allow me to create double demand for whatever product I chose, and at the same time, to ramp up my pizza production potential? Or was I warning him, in deeds if not words, “hey, look, there is a pizza bomb coming. You can ramp up your pizza production now and grab some of it or you can ignore the warning signs and suffer the consequences”? Is it mean to tell your opponents what your plans are three turns in advance? Or is it just brutal to those who fail to listen?
This is why FCM is so delightful and so delightfully difficult, and yet, not mean in the slightest. What the game does is it asks players to interact and focus on their fellow players, and then it promises to punish those who take their focus off the competition for even one turn. This differentiates it from so many other economic Euros, and it is why I love this game. Give it a try if you can but watch out for those pizza bombs!
